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John is the ultimate Barrymore-the most charming, the most beautifully ac- cursed of them all. Mrs. John Drew, poor Georgiana, and Maurice died with their age, but John spans eras, with, on the one hand, a "Hamlet" designed to run just long enough to break Edwin Booth's record in the part and, on the other hand, "Don Juan," the first feature film with a soundtrack. And it is not only the work that in- trigues but the life. John may have struck attitudes-a reasonable release for an imaginative child neglected by his parents and reared by a tyrant grandmother-but he quietly, steadily, and fiercely nourished a doom so elec- trically stubborn that Eugene O'Neill, another scion of the gilded stage, might have feared to set it down. So writers tend to focus on John. Ethel baffies them; Lionel is embarrass- ing. At least, Ethel was glamorous- Alice Roosevelt's only rival, in the early nineteen-hundreds, as the Great American Girl. When a yacht that Ethel was cruising on happened to pass a ship in distress, one headline ran "ETHEL BARRYMORE SEES VESSEL SINK." And Ethel was witty and Ethel was cantankerous-a tempting com- bination for the chronicler. Like Thomas Beecham and Samuel Gold- wyn, she is a stockpile of anecdotes: on her deathbed, when a friend, keep- ing the conversation up as Ethel's mind wanders, mentions that Bette Davis and Gary Merril1 are touring in a poetry concert, "The World of Car] Sandburg," Ethel suddenly murmurs, "Thanks for the warning." What lay between Ethel's mots is all mystery, because that's how Ethel wanted it. Lionel is harder still. When Cameron Shipp worked with him on "We Barrymores"- in fact, wrote it, on information he pulled from Lionel like teeth-he found that Lionel could say nothing about the eighteen years during which he was married to his first wife. He didn't even recall her name. When Shipp tried to rally his memory with a few facts, Lionel simply cried, "Well, you don't say!"-which sounds uncannily like the codgers Lionel played in so many movies. All the world's a stage, because those Bar- rymores never quite came off it. Meeting the tetchy, offensive old bohe- FEBRUARY 4, 1991 mian Sadakichi Hartmann (Fowler tells us), John observed, "What a won- derful part you would be for Lionel!" S O it is with pleasure that we greet Margot Peters' "The House of Barrymore" (Knopf; $29.95), because, for the first time, all three of the chil- dren with the wonderful power are pulled off that stage of theirs and brought to book. Peters' endpapers bear the Lane-Drew-Barrymore line to eight generations, but the dust-jacket photographs tell us whom the chronicle weighs upon: Lionel, Ethel, and John. Peters enjoys crucial advantages over her predecessors-surpassing scholar- ship, for one. Fowler, Kobler, Kotsili- bas-Davis, and others have been con- sulted, along with primary sources. But Peters' investigation was dense and in- sistent, as her notes, which run to sixty- seven pages, reveal. Her honesty, too, affirms her book's superiority. If Fow- ler is little more than a eulogizer, Kobler is so discreet that he can seem unknow- ing, like the Barrymores themselves. He is comfortable with the debunked theory that John Gilbert's movie career collapsed because his "natural voice was thin and reedy," whereas Peters, well aware of the vendetta that L. B. Mayer was running against Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer's biggest male star, tells us, "His voice was quite low, though lacking warmth. What seems to have sunk him is how he was made to use it." Peters raises a point appar- entl y never considered before: "His Glorious Night," the feature that at once heralded and destroyed the notion of a talking John Gilbert, was abysmal- ly directed-possibly with L. B. May- er's connivance-by Lionel. Similarly, Kobler's treatment of Barrymore's relationship with the playwright Ned Sheldon typifies the sensibility that separates the prudent biographer from the eliciting one. It was Mercedes de Acosta, that profes- sional intimate of other greats and near-greats, who first wrote that the mysterious crippling disease that turned Broadway's handsomest, merri- est, and wisest young writer into a breathing corpse was a psychosomatic manifestation of Sheldon's terrified love for the virulently homophobic J ohn. Medically, the case bewilders, but everything about Sheldon points to a tensely closeted homosexuality, and he and John were very close. Kobler quotes de Acosta only to suggest that